Direction finding by time modulated linear array

A novel direction finding method with the time modulated linear array (TMLA) is proposed and verified, by establishing the relationship between the incident angle and the generated harmonic characteristic matrix (HCM). The principle is that the generated HCM because of the periodical modulation varies with the incident direction of the RF signal. Compared to the existing direction finding method, the proposed method has simple structure and low calculation complexity. Numeric simulation is provided to examine its performance and an 8-element S-band TMLA is constructed to verify its effectiveness.